LINKFEST

Just a bunch of random links (some new, others old), many of which have been sitting in my email inbox for a quite a while. I might revisit some of the news stories and/or info contained within these links sometime later on this blog.

+ An excellent collection of e-books related to agriculture, environmental history, ecology, sustainability, and other related topics is located HERE

+ “Tennessee Agrarians” by Edmund Wilson – “Cousin Charles’s feeling about the depression is that it serves the “industrialists” right. He pointed out in a magazine article seven years ago that the present trouble with the country was that the cities were getting overgrown – Megalopolis, as Spengler calls it. Strange that it should have been left for a German to diagnose our American disease.”

+ Another one from Lester Brown which I will quote: “Throwing Out the Throwaway Economy” — major cities such as NYC are daily exporting their uncountable tons of garbage, waste, sewage, and pollution to more ecologically sustainable and less crowded areas of the USA:

– “One of the first major cities to exhaust its locally available landfills was New York. When the Fresh Kills landfill, the local destination for New York’s garbage, was permanently closed in March 2001, the city found itself hauling garbage to landfill sites in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and even Virginia—with some of the sites being 300 miles away. [ED:the state of Kentucky receives a lot of NYC’s garbage, also]

Given the 12,000 tons of garbage produced each day in New York and assuming a load of 20 tons of garbage for each of the tractor-trailers used for the long-distance hauling, some 600 rigs are needed to move garbage from New York City daily. These tractor-trailers form a convoy nearly nine miles long—impeding traffic, polluting the air, and raising carbon emissions.

Fiscally strapped local communities in other states are willing to take New York’s garbage—if they are paid enough. Some see it as an economic bonanza. State governments, however, are saddled with increased road maintenance costs, traffic congestion, increased air pollution, potential water pollution from landfill leakage, and complaints from nearby communities.

In 2001 Virginia’s Governor Jim Gilmore wrote to Mayor Rudy Giuliani to complain about the use of Virginia for New York City’s trash. “I understand the problem New York faces,” he noted, “but the home state of Washington, Jefferson and Madison has no intention of becoming New York’s dumping ground.”